WHAT’S UNDER THE HOOD? A 6.2-liter V-8 with 411 horsepower and 434 pound-feet of torque.

IS IT THIRSTY? Like a rhinoceros who’s been eating saltines for a week: The E.P.A. rating is 11 m.p.g. city, 14 m.p.g. highway.

CAR companies often build special models around a high-performance engine. BMW’s M cars, Cadillac’s V editions and the Mercedes-Benz AMG line are all defined by some sort of huge upgrade under the hood. Much less often, a manufacturer decides to spend its skunk-works budget modifying a car’s suspension. In recent years, the latter approach gave us vehicles like the Subaru Legacy Spec B.

Hey, how about those inverted Bilstein struts on the Subaru Legacy Spec B?

The Ford F-150 SVT Raptor joins the lonely Spec B on the list of suspension-first performance vehicles. In creating the Raptor, Ford’s Special Vehicle Team essentially ignored the engine and lavished its efforts on transforming the chassis into a Baja-ready bump-annihilation system. Up front, new aluminum lower A-arms are mounted to gleaming Fox Racing remote-reservoir dampers.

You’d think that with a foot of travel and the tires’ towering sidewalls, the Raptor would wallow like a swamped container ship. But the damping isn’t linear. The first few inches of travel are soft, smothering small bumps, but the position-sensitive damping firms up as the shocks become fully compressed.

It’s surprising how well this desert-bred setup works on the road. If 35-inch tires and remote-reservoir dampers can soak up 65 m.p.h. moguls out in the boonies, then urban potholes are of no concern. The Raptor offers a cushy ride and steering that actually gives you a clue of what’s happening down at the road — a rare quality in a pickup truck.

But the Raptor is really at home on the high-speed off-road terrain of the West. Out on the dry river beds of Arizona or the dunes of Glamis, the Raptor is so good at its mission that it imparts a certain feeling of invincibility. Which, for some owners, could be their undoing.

A friend in the Army once told me that the guys at his base refer to the Humvee as “God’s S.U.V.” because its immense off-road abilities often lead to a false sense of confidence. Drivers would think their Humvees could practically drive through a lake, until the day they literally tried to drive through a lake — necessitating extrication by a military bulldozer.

The Raptor is like that when it comes to bumps. Last year, when I was using a Raptor on patrol in the Arizona desert — while on a reporting assignment with the Yuma Police Department, which has its own Raptors for desert duty — I became conditioned to driving at highway speeds regardless of whether there was a highway anywhere nearby. Or, for that matter, any road at all.

In skier parlance, I eventually “went big,” to the extent that I bottomed out the front suspension. Trust me: If you’ve run out of suspension travel on a Raptor, you need to pull over and repeat the words “trucks aren’t supposed to fly” until you once again believe them.

That Raptor was a 2010 model, which initially came with an overworked 320-horsepower, 5.4-liter V-8. I’ve subsequently driven a 2011 model with the new 6.2-liter V-8 — now the sole engine — and it’s a vast improvement.

The Raptor’s wild suspension is still its defining characteristic, but the larger engine gives the truck the muscle to match the rest of its extroverted personality — the Tonka Toy sheet metal, the hey-look-at-me exhaust note and the decidedly outrageous interior.

On the latter point, thanks to the Raptor, no longer must you buy a custom Ferrari or Lamborghini to get orange leather seats. No longer must you buy a Porsche GT3 RS to get a contrasting centering mark on the steering wheel.

And no longer must you buy a box of toggle switches at Radio Shack to get a bunch of useless toggle switches. The Raptor comes with a whole row of them, standard.

Ford says they’re for hooking up extra off-road lights, C.B. radios, fog machines and other accessories that truck guys need. But even as is, connected to nothing, the row of gratuitous switches sends the message that you’re the type of on-the-go customer who needs a lot of switches.

The Raptor looks like a life-size radio-control car, it swallows gas and I really want it, even though I live in the Northeast where it would rarely have room to roam.

If the Raptor were available with the EcoBoost twin-turbocharged V-6 (which returns 21 m.p.g. on the highway in other F-150 4x4s), I’d have a hard time driving past the Ford dealer every day.

The first time I got behind the wheel of a Raptor, I drove to Jay Leno’s garage to check out his collection of vintage cars and motorcycles. He eyed the orange truck outside and asked what it was.

“Ford basically built a Baja prerunner out of the F-150,” I said. Mr. Leno replied, “Well, they didn’t take a bailout. They can build whatever they want.”

Indeed, the Raptor is a prime example of the strange alchemy that can happen when a company takes an autocratic approach to product development. You might not think you wanted a towering desert racer pickup, but just wait until you drive one.

A version of this review appears in print on February 13, 2011, on Page AU2 of the New York edition with the headline: A Tonka Toy for a Very Big Sandbox. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe